John Simpson Smith was married to a Cheyenne woman and in November 1864 he was back from Washington and living with her in a village of Southern Cheyennes and Arapahos on the banks of Sand Creek near Fort Lyon, where the Indians had camped supposedly under the protection of the US Army. Smith and his son Jack were eating breakfast when Colonel John Chivington and a regiment of Colorado Volunteers attacked the village. John Smith survived the ensuing slaughter, as did the Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, and his wife, who sustained nine gunshot wounds. Jack was murdered after the massacre. The treacherous nature of the attack, the wanton slaughter of women and children, and the gruesome mutilation of the bodies prompted a congressional investigation and inflamed the Plains.46
In the Pacific Northwest, Congress in 1853 divided Oregon Territory into Oregon and Washington territories. The new superintendent of Indian affairs in Oregon, Joel Palmer, negotiated a series of treaties with Oregon tribes.47 In Washington, anxious to clear the way for construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad through his territory, Governor Isaac Stevens acted as superintendent of Indian affairs as well. Between Christmas 1854 and January 1856, he negotiated, many would say dictated, ten treaties with multiple tribes in what would become Idaho and western Montana as well as Washington State. He acquired some seventy million acres by “confederating” multiple tribes onto shared reservations where they were expected to learn to live like Americans. To expedite matters, Stevens and his associates drafted the treaties in advance of the treaty councils and the texts, except in their descriptions of the lands to be ceded, were nearly identical. “This is a great day for you and for us,” Stevens announced to the Nisqually, Puyallup, and other Indians who assembled for his first treaty at Medicine Creek at the mouth of the Nisqually River on Christmas Day, 1854. “You are about to be paid for your lands, and the Great Father has sent me today to treat with you concerning the payment.” The Indians ceded 2.5 million acres and retained 3,840 acres. The story was the same at the other treaties in the Puget Sound Basin as the small tribes gave up most of their land, but they did retain “the right of taking fish, at all usual and accustomed grounds and stations … in common with all citizens of the Territory.” Stevens’s high-handed, threatening, and deceitful treaty-making tactics, combined with continuing encroachments by American miners and settlers, sparked outbreaks of violent resistance, which Stevens promptly and ruthlessly suppressed. The Nisqually chief, Leschi, was tried by a kangaroo court and hanged for his part in the fighting.48
Stevens faced stiffer opposition from the larger tribes east of the Cascade Mountains. The Cayuses, Wallawallas, Umatillas, Yakamas, and Nez Perces who met with Stevens and Palmer in the Walla Walla Valley in May 1855 were in no mood to be browbeaten. Lieutenant Lawrence Kip, a young officer who was with the military escort, described the dramatic arrival of the Nez Perces, some 2,500 “wild horsemen in single file, clashing their shields, singing, and beating their drums as they marched past us. Then they formed a circle and dashed around us, while our little group stood there, the centre of their wild evolutions” (see figure 5.1). By the time all the tribes arrived, about five thousand Indians were gathered in the valley, and there was much feasting and horse racing. The Nez Perces had been friendly to Americans since Lewis and Clark had stumbled starving into their country, and in 1831 four Nez Perces had journeyed to St. Louis to see William Clark and learn about Christianity. Now, noted Kip, they held prayers in their lodges every morning and evening, and several times on Sunday.49
FIGURE 5.1 Arrival of the Nez Perce Indians at the meeting for the Walla Walla Treaty, May 1855, by Gustav Sohon. (Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma)
When the council got under way, Stevens and Palmer sat in front of an arbor facing the Indians who sat in the open air in concentric semicircles, “the chiefs in the front ranks, in order of their dignity, while the background was filled with women and children.” Several scribes sat at a table taking notes of everything that was said and, Kip learned later, “two or three of the half civilized Nez Perces, who could write, were keeping a minute account of all that transpired at these meetings.”50 Stevens and Palmer had to work hard before their inflated promises, threats, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering took effect. Monitoring what had been going on west of the mountains, the Yakama head chief Kamiakin had worked to stiffen resistance among the tribes, and he demonstrated his distrust of the commissioners and their treaty making by refusing Stevens’s gift of tobacco. The Nez Perce chief Lawyer, a Christian so-called for his ability to talk, voiced his approval of the treaty, but the other tribes were hostile to it and Kamiakin kept silent. Then on Saturday, June 9, seventy-year-old Looking Glass, the second Nez Perce chief who had been away hunting when the council began, spoke so strongly against the treaty that not only the Nez Perces but all the other tribes refused to sign it. Kip assumed the commissioners would have to “bring some cogent arguments to bear upon Looking Glass.” The Nez Perces spent all Sunday in council among themselves, and Lawyer and a group of Indians visited the commissioners before breakfast on Monday. At 10 a.m. Stevens opened the council with a short speech and then asked the chiefs to come forward and sign the papers. “This they all did without the least opposition,” wrote Kip. “What he has been doing with Looking Glass since last Saturday, we cannot imagine, but we suppose savage nature in the wilderness is the same as civilized nature was in England in Walpole’s day, and ‘every man has his price.’”51 William Cameron McKay, a secretary and interpreter, was present when Kamiakin signed the Yakama treaty. When the Indians hesitated, Stevens told them that if they did not sign the treaty they would “walk in blood knee deep.” Kamiakin made a cross on the paper. “When he returned to his seat, his lips were covered with blood, having bitten them in suppressed rage.” “Thus ended in the most satisfactory manner this great council,” McKay wrote in his journal. The Indians ceded about forty-five thousand square miles at Walla Walla.52 The same year, gold was discovered on the newly created Yakama reservation. When Kamiakin led the tribes in a united resistance against trespassing miners, tensions exploded in the so-called Yakama War.
After Walla Walla, Stevens met with 1,200 Salish (Flathead), Pend d’Oreilles, and Kutenais at the Hell Gate Council near Missoula in western Montana. There, in the summation of the Jesuit historian Robert Ignatius Burns, he demonstrated his customary “patronizing impatience” for a “lesser race whose problems intruded upon his policies and career.”53 Accompanied by delegates from the western tribes, he then pushed on across the Continental Divide to Fort Benton where he met the Blackfeet in a large multitribal gathering of fifty-nine chiefs from ten different tribes, although it is often called Lame Bull’s Treaty, after the Piegan chief whose name appears first on the document. Unlike Stevens’s previous treaties, the purpose of the Blackfoot peace council was not to impose land cessions or remove people to reservations but to establish intertribal peace and obtain consent to building “roads of every description” through the region. In the Walla Walla and Hell Gate treaties Stevens had recognized the right of tribes from west of the Rockies to continue crossing the mountains from their newly established reservations to hunt buffalo on the northern plains; now he designated a common hunting ground centered on the headwaters of the Missouri and the Yellowstone and secured Blackfoot agreement to share it in peace with the tribes from beyond the mountains. In return, the Blackfeet would receive $20,000 in annuities for ten years and an additional $15,000 for the same period in farming instruction and education. A contentious council with the Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Colville Indians that failed to produce a treaty wrapped up Stevens’s rapid-fire diplomatic grand tour through Northwest Indian country.54 Construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad began in 1870 and eventually it snaked across Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Stevens did not live to see it; he died while fighting in the Civil War. But the so-called Indian problem Stevens faced—removing Indians to make way for railroads and settlers—remained.
Congress passed the
Pacific Railroad Act of July 1862 as a war measure designed to help preserve California and the West for the Union. The act provided government bonds and land subsidies to encourage and assist the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies in constructing a line between the Missouri River and the Pacific. It also charged that the United States must “extinguish as rapidly as may be the Indian titles to all lands falling under the operation of this act.” Subsequent railroad acts increased the incentives. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1864 doubled the amount of land granted so that the railroad companies received 12,800 acres of land in checkerboard sections along both sides of the railway line for every mile of track they built. The railroad companies attracted emigrants (and sold their lands to them) which also increased the value of the lands retained by the government for sale. The “public land” that the government awarded to the railroad companies in vast quantities was Indian land.55 Thomas Jefferson had envisioned the United States as a republic of self-sufficient yeoman farmers but the thousands of immigrants who poured into eastern cities became mill and factory workers dependent on food from elsewhere. The West would feed the labor force of the industrial revolution. Texas cattlemen found a way out of the postwar depression by driving herds north to meet the railheads and shipping their cattle east. The government needed to remove Indians to make way for railroads that were vital to the nation’s growth and unity, and to replace herds of buffalo with herds of cattle to feed the nation’s workers.
The task of reuniting and reconstructing the nation after the war required remaking the West as well as remaking the South, incorporating Indians as well as former slaves, which, as western historian Elliott West notes, meant “giving freedom to slaves and taking it away from Indians.” No sooner had the United States settled “the negro question” and fought a bloody war over the black race, declared Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri, chairman of the Senate Committee of Indian Affairs, than “it seems, we must have another war over the red man.”56 The question of the hour for men like Henderson was what to do about the Indians given the harsh realities of American expansion and the inevitable outcome of the historic struggle between barbarism and civilization. “We have reached a point in our national history,” wrote Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel G. Taylor in 1867, when “there are but two alternatives left to us as to what shall be the future of the Indian, namely swift extermination by the sword, and famine, or preservation by gradual concentration on territorial reserves, and civilization.” Located “in the way of our toiling and enterprising population,” the Plains tribes would be submerged and buried unless they were confined and “civilized.”57 Instead of being removed from place to place and pushed to the brink of extinction, the Indians must be assigned to reservations where they would give up living as buffalo-hunting nomads and become sedentary farmers on their own land. And they had better do it soon. They did not have many options.
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Medicine Lodge, 1867
CONTAINMENT ON THE PLAINS
In October 1867, the United States Peace Commission negotiated three treaties in one—with the Kiowas and Comanches, with the Plains Apaches, and with the Southern Cheyennes and Southern Arapahos—at the confluence of Elm Creek and Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge was a major event in shaping and implementing the nation’s Indian policy in the aftermath of the Civil War. Pressured by humanitarian concerns that the Indians faced extinction, and by the staggering financial costs of a protracted Indian war, the Peace Commission sought to bring peace and civilization to the Plains. The goal of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, in the view of the commissioners who negotiated it, was to settle the southern Plains Indians in Indian Territory alongside the Cherokees and other tribes “preparatory to declaring them citizens of the U. States, and the establishment of a government over them.”1
The policy of confining Indians to reservations and “civilizing them” was not new, but the Treaty of Medicine Lodge laid out a blueprint for transforming Indians and set out the agenda with unprecedented clarity and new urgency. More than ever before, reservations were to function as crucibles of change. Indians would be assigned a reservation that would serve as “a permanent home” where no whites could enter without the tribe’s approval; they would be furnished with the tools and skills to survive in American society, and they signed their agreement to embark on a new path. As a prerequisite to this new start, the Peace Commission sought to end the bloody clashes between Americans and Native Americans on the Plains and end the way of life the Indians were fighting to preserve. Indian speakers at Medicine Lodge repeatedly voiced their reluctance and refusal to give up the life they loved but the treaty was predicated on the certainty that the destruction of the economy and culture of the southern tribes was imminent and inevitable. Indians had to move on to reservations to survive.2
A Peace Commission for the Plains
The Plains were on fire in 1867. After the Sand Creek massacre in November 1864, Cheyenne warriors flocked to the camps of the militant Dog Soldiers, the elite military society, in the Smoky Hill region of northern Kansas and southern Nebraska. They carried out raids in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, and attacked railroads and wagon routes across the central Plains, although Black Kettle moved his band of some seventy lodges south of the Arkansas and joined the Southern Arapahos, Kiowas, and Comanches.3
Attempts to end the violence proved futile. In October 1865 US commissioners met some of the southern Plains tribes at the Treaty of the Little Arkansas, near present-day Wichita. The shadow of Sand Creek hung over the talks. “There is something very strong for us,” said the Arapaho chief, Little Raven: “that fool band of soldiers that cleaned out our lodges and killed our women and children.” The commissioners showed the Indians the government’s investigations in “a book and papers that contain all the proceedings of the Sand Creek affair,” and the treaty included an apology and reparations for “the gross and wanton outrages perpetrated.” The treaty also assigned a new reservation on the border of Kansas and the Indian Territory to the Cheyennes and Arapahos, although they were free to range between the Platte and Arkansas rivers until the United States had extinguished the title claims of other Indians, especially the Cherokees and Osages, to the reservation area. The treaty promised annuities for forty years, and special grants of land were made to leading chiefs. In return, the Cheyennes and Arapahos present relinquished claims to all other land, including their hunting territories in western Kansas, thereby accepting a substantial reduction of the territory designated for them at Fort Laramie in 1851. The Plains Apaches agreed to be party to the treaty. In a separate treaty, the Kiowas and Comanches were assigned a large reservation stretching across the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and part of west Texas, with freedom to range south of the Arkansas River until title to the reservation area was settled. The chiefs agreed to refrain from attacking transportation routes and settlements and to return white captives. Black Kettle stressed that he could not speak for those who were not there, however, and most Cheyennes and Arapahos rejected the treaty.4
Many of the tribal representatives would appear two years later at Medicine Lodge: Black Kettle and Little Robe of the Cheyennes; Little Raven of the Arapahos; Satank, Satanta, Teneangopte or Tonaenko, known as Kicking Bird, and Lone Wolf or Guipahko of the Kiowas; Ten Bears of the Yamparika Comanches, and Toshaway or Silver Brooch, chief of the Penetekas or “Honey Eaters,” the largest Comanche band who lived on the Wichita agency and “already could be classified as reservation Indians.”5 Army generals John B. Sanborn and William Harney, the interpreters John Simpson Smith and Margaret Wilmarth or Wilmott, the Indian superintendent Thomas Murphy, the agent Jesse Leavenworth, and the treaty commissioner William Bent also would reconvene at Medicine Lodge. Margaret Wilmott was Thomas Fitzpatrick’s widow. William Bent and his brother Charles had been trading with the Plains Indians since the early 1820s. In 1833, together with Cerain St. Vrain they built Bent’s Fort on the north side of the A
rkansas River (at present-day La Junta, Colorado), a prominent adobe structure and the largest trading post on the Plains. William Bent married a Cheyenne named Owl Woman, daughter of the keeper of the sacred medicine arrows, with whom he had four children; after she died in 1846, he married her younger sister, Yellow Woman, with whom he had a fifth child. Senator John Henderson said Bent was “known to every man who knows anything about the Indians.” At “the special request” of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, the United States at the Little Arkansas treaty granted patents for 640 acres in fee simple to certain persons, “all of whom are related to the Cheyennes or Arrapahoes by blood,” including Margaret Wilmott and her children, William Bent’s children and their children, and John Smith’s children.6
The Senate ratified the Little Arkansas treaty in May 1866 but amended it so that no land in Kansas would be included in the reservation, and commissioners had to return to the southern Plains to secure tribal agreement. The Cheyennes kept Sand Creek “fresh in their memories”7 and those who had refused to attend the treaty felt no obligation to observe the terms Black Kettle had accepted. The famous Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose agreed to listen only because the Americans were strong. “I do not believe the whites,” he said. “I do not love them. If I had plenty of warriors I would drive them out of this country.” When the commissioners asked Tall Bear and Bull Bear to sign the amendment papers, the two Dog Soldier chiefs smoked for a time, then got up and left without signing or replying. The Dog Soldiers continued to dominate the region between the Platte and the Arkansas. Annuities promised under the Little Arkansas treaty arrived late and were of poor quality. Construction crews pushed the Kansas Pacific Railroad westward along the Smoky Hill River but Cheyenne attacks threatened to bring work to a standstill. Settlers in Kansas were angered that the Treaty of the Little Arkansas acknowledged Indian hunting rights north of the Arkansas. Texas steadfastly resisted setting up a reservation for Kiowas and Comanches in its public domain. War on the southern Plains continued.8 The Kiowas were as resistant as the Dog Soldiers. Agent Charles Bogy reckoned the Kiowas “probably the worst tribe, considered in all respects, on the plains.”9
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